Back Issues: Dr. Seuss

Today is Dr. Seuss’s birthday; he would have been a hundred and six years old. Theodor Seuss Geisel was profiled in The New Yorker in 1960, by E. J. Kahn, Jr. On the origins of Seuss’s most famous creation, Kahn reports:

“The Cat in the Hat” evolved from a 1954 article in Life by John Hersey, who complained of the sorry state of children’s primers and suggested that someone like Dr. Seuss ought to give the kids a break by providing them with sprightlier fare. Among those who urged Geisel to accept this challenge was William Spaulding, then the textbook editor and now the president of Houghton Mifflin. Having long felt that “See the red ball? The ball is red” school of literature left a good deal to be desired, Geisel did not need much prodding.

In his 2002 Critic at Large about “The Cat and the Hat,” Louis Menand saw Dr. Seuss’s accomplishment as being far greater than simply giving kids a break from dull primers:

“The Cat in the Hat” was a Cold War invention. His value as an analyst of the psychology of his time, the late nineteen-fifties, is readily appreciated: transgression and hypocrisy are the principal themes of his little story. But he also stands in an intimate and paradoxical relation to national-security policy. He was both its creature and its nemesis—the unraveller of the very culture that produced him and that made him a star. This is less surprising than it may seem. He was, after all, a cat.

The entire Kahn article—and the complete archives of The New Yorker, back to 1925—is available to subscribers. Non-subscribers can purchase the individual issue.